15 September 2014

There's been a bit of an uproar of late about Apple
giving
away—more
precisely, installing in everyone's iTunes libraries—a
copy of a new U2 album. This has made many people very
uncomfortable, so much so that Apple had to create a
special
removal tool. Why is this so upsetting? Would people have been so
upset if Apple had simply mailed them a CD? I doubt it—but why
is this different?

We often have an uneasy relationship with our gadgets because we
don't really feel that we control them. Often, they do something
completely unexpected.
Of course,
that's generally due to buggy code or to user misunderstanding of what
should happen, rather than anything more sinister.
Sometimes, though, we're reminded that
the vendor still has certain powers. This is one such time.

Generally, we purchase our toys. I own my iPhone; no one else has
any rights to do anything to it. That's even a provision of
Federal law,
which criminalizes access
"without authorization or exceeding authorized access". We don't
buy software or services, though; rather, we license them, and we
rarely understand the precise license terms. In this case, Apple
exercised certain rights not over our devices directly, but over
our iTunes accounts; this in turn caused the album to be downloaded
to our devices, whether or not we wanted it.
(Aside: I didn't see any relevant clauses, pro or con, in the
iTunes
Terms and Conditions page.)
This was, to say the least, surprising.

The problem is that by doing this, Apple has violated our mental model
of our personal space, or perhaps our personal cyberspace. Our iTunes
library is our iTunes library; it feels wrong for someone
else to mess with it. This violates what I've
termed the
Technical-Social Contract.
I noted seven years ago that

Fundamentally, these incidents are all the same: people had a mental
(and sometimes legal) model of what was "normal" and possible; technology
changed, and one party's behavior changed with it, to the shock
of the other.

That's what has happened here: Apple has surprised people with its
ability to control "our" space. It's not as nasty or as unpleasant
as when Amazon
deleted
1984
from someone's Kindle, but the unease stems from the same source: the
company has power over "our" content. We understand physical junk mail,
even if it's an unwanted CD. This, though, feels more like somone walking
into our houses and putting a new CD on our shelves. If Apple had merely
mailed out a URL—"click here to get a new, free album!"—no one
would have been upset. That isn't what they did.